George N. Rouskas is a computer scientist, academic, and author. He is an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.
Rouskas' research interests lie within the field of computer networking. Specifically, he focuses on optical networks, internet architectures and protocols, network design and optimization, performance modeling, and scheduling. He is the author of the book Internet Tiered Services, and co-editor of the books Traffic Grooming for Optical Networks and Next-Generation Internet: Architectures and Protocols. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2004 ALCOA Foundation Engineering Research Achievement Award, as well as the Optical Networking Technical Committee (OTNC) Outstanding Service Award.
Rouskas is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and served as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in 2010 for a year. From 2016 to 2017, he held key positions within the IEEE Communications Society, serving as the Chair of the Distinguished Lecturer Selection Committee, the Chair of the Optical Networking Technical Committee (ONTC), and the vice-chair of the Technical and Educational Activities Council. He served as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Optical Switching and Networking from 2004 to 2017, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Networking Letters from 2018 to 2021.
Education
Rouskas earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1989. He then pursued a master's degree in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which he completed in 1991, and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution in 1994.
Career
Rouskas began his academic career at North Carolina State University in 1994 as an assistant professor. In 1999, he was appointed as an Associate Professor and later promoted to Professor in 2002, a position he held until 2018. Between 2000 and 2001, he spent a sabbatical term at Vitesse Semiconductor in Morrisville, North Carolina. He has held visiting positions at several institutions as well, including King Abdulaziz University, Laboratoire d’Informatique at the University of Paris 6, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, and Laboratoire de Méthodes Informatiques at the University of Évry. Since 2018, he has been holding an appointment as the Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.
Since 2014, he has been serving as the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.
Research
Rouskas is most known for his work on designing architectures, protocols, and algorithms for internet-scale networks, utilizing interdisciplinary techniques from mathematical programming, discrete optimization, algorithmics, and queueing theory to create efficient and scalable solutions. He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal papers, conference papers and book chapters. Most notably, he has worked on the Jumpstart project, focusing on optical burst switching technology, and the DARPA-funded Helios project, involving multi-wavelength optical access networks.
Internet architecture and protocols
In 1997, Rouskas designed a network core addressing key internet challenges, offering solutions for service choice enablement, competition incentives, and control management, and formulated HiPeR-l, a novel reservation protocol for addressing media access problems in single-hop WDM networks. Afterwards, as part of the DARPA project, he, along with Ilya Baldin and Laura Jackson, presented an all-optical broadcast architecture for a LAN utilizing Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). The Helios architecture, accompanied by a signaling protocol and control algorithms, integrated essential elements of DiffServ (Quality of Service) and multicast. In addition, he developed an "economy plane" facilitating the sale of services like QoS and storage by network providers as well as created a ChoiceNet prototype enabling contractual agreements between multiple service providers in GENI.
Rouskas expanded on the future of the Internet debate by proposing a holistic internetworking architecture that offered flexibility, security, and performance enhancements. His 2002 collaborative work proposed MTCP, a congestion control scheme for reliable multicast, and in 2020, he built an algorithm for online service chain routing in NFV, minimizing congestion and hops, demonstrating asymptotic optimality without future request knowledge.